A History Teacher Reacts | "The Problem With Africa's Borders" by Atlas Pro

[Music] hey youtube welcome back to another history teacher axe video of mr. Teri's I continued my search for historical knowledge here on the Internet alright today's video is the problem with Africa's border by a channel called atlas Pro which I have not watched yet but I see it's very popular and just looking kind of through their things looks like the folks I get on a lot of geography which is awesome I love geography it goes hand in hand with history and I love it even just from the you know the the non historical elements of geography so I'm really interested this I'm also very interested in Africa especially when you comes to borders and imperialism and colonization it's a big part of world history and when I saw the title that's the problem with Africa's borders I brought a lot of things just to my mind right away um specifically like the Scramble for Africa in the late 1800s and early 1900s where European nations came in and colonized virtually the entire continent and we know the big problem that came with that was they established borders not based off of local traditions or local customs cultures and things like that but more for for the purposes of European nations agreeing upon border so they don't have border disputes and that has been a big thing that has hurt Africa especially in the post-colonial era because they basically those borders are intact but don't make a lot of local cultural sense which is given way to all kinds of different political and social issues in Africa so make sure to see what they have here I think this could go a lot of ways but I hope to learn a lot and I'll try to share anything I can with you as well if you like this original video go down to the description and make sure you give them a like and subscribe love to I love to have you as a sub on my channel as well and be a part of our community so be sure to hit that sub button enable notifications for the live streams and let's go ahead and get started when the Europeans colonized Africa they cared about one thing above all else profit whether it is gold from Guinea Cadabra from the Congo diamonds from South Africa the goal was to extract resources and send them back home it's important understand unsoftened for this the the mode of the economic motivations for specific parts of Africa like I said in the intro Africa gets colonized by virtually every or every part of it gets colonized virtually except for Ethiopia and Liberia but I'm knowing these specific natural resources of a natural resource instruction that it's really important for you know they cared about one thing above all else profit whether it was gold from Guinea now this region to also used to be the bigger agent region where the Europeans would conduct a slave trade right and by the late eighteen hundreds of slave trade the European slave trade had ended so it Dow came to more of natural resource acquisition especially in these other places rubber from the Congo rubber is really important because rubber is a necessary component lead us to revolution this colonial era goes hand-in-hand with the Industrial Revolution and rubber components were something I made the machinery of the Industrial Revolution possible and places like the Congo were full of that or diamonds from South Africa the goal was to other diamond sources and send them back home this focus on profitability led the European powers to hold the Berlin conference where Africa was divided between 18-year old colonial powers diplomatically to avoid any conflict between Europeans after all conflicts cost money which at the end of the day threatened the profitability of the colonies what wasn't taken into account where the divisions among the Africans themselves yeah what this resulted in was coke they didn't mention it the Berlin conference was basically a European okay a conference held by leaders to discuss Africa's basically the borders and to settle what the the rules would be for colonization now there's a couple key parts of the Berlin conference that you're gonna want to understand one is they set up the rules sort of for and basically they said as a European nation could claim an orchid could claim whatever unclaimed territory now what that means though is unclaimed by other Europeans doesn't matter if there are African states there that that was kind of the rule that then you could do that another important important component of the Berlin conference though is that no African nations were actually represented at that conference to speak on their behalf that was not on the agenda or even they didn't want that opinion of the African leaders cohesive nations like the Masai being divided between English Kenya and German East Africa what later became Tanzania and the bigger the nation was the more divided it often became the Yoruba nation for example with a population today of 44 million people were split between English Nigeria the French West Africa German togolese and the English Gold Coast you can see how this is gonna be a disaster when I mean that the the the colonial nations can keep the people together in a way and keep it a functioning nation but it's again when these nations leave and they stick with these borders you saw that how do you get any kind of cultural unity in a nation how can you get people on board with political decisions any kind of cultural decisions you have this much diversity people do not understand often how diverse Africa actually is and you had the borders that are there today do not represent African culture directly north the house a nation with a population of 75 million today were divided in half by English Nigeria and French West Africa what eventually became Niger both of which were partially included within the borders of modern-day Nigeria alongside the EBU another tribe of around 49 million people whose traditional lands lie in well look what this is gonna do okay when they're eventually independent people like to vote for their people that represent their culture like okay you're gonna have a democracy back all right you're gonna be a democracy think of how many different political parties you're gonna have just based off these ethnic differences people at someone that represents the house and the aruba Igbo and then try to have a demócrata you know process you're gonna have so many different people somebody's gonna win but with like 20 percent 15 percent you know and I mean it's not gonna be you're never gonna get a majority vote it's gonna be a difficult thing entirely within the country's borders and that's not to mention all the smaller tribes crammed in between them often leading to intense competition over the lands collectively deemed as theirs for some perspective Spain today has nearly the same population as the yoruba France has slightly fewer people than the Hausa and the EBU have a population greater than Portugal Belgium and the Netherlands combined so imagine someone coming in tucky but you don't even know about them because they don't have a nation they're not called you know there's no nation of the Yoruba you know what I mean so you just think of other Nigerians but that like or something but that term doesn't really mean anything Europe drawing a country that included only half of Spain half of France and also all those other guys that is a simplified version of what Nigeria and many many other African nations are in the worst cases these borders created a mess of civil wars revolutions and genocides within and between many African nations as the people tried to better align their countries to their nations these events serve as reminders of just how impactful lines on a map can be but the great thing about borders and what this whole disaster proves is that borders are just that lines on a map that can be changed can't be changed but yeah what and but when those European nations left I'm a lot of those those what are gonna be now independent nations agreed to actually keep their borders a lot of them did that when maybe I would have been better to to form their own but it didn't matter anyways because at the beginning of the video he talked about how the whole colonial era was meant to benefit the European host nations right the manufacturing the infrastructure is all in Europe and things like that the job creation that way there is no infrastructure or local government build up there so when the Europeans leave they leave those people with nothing and the one thing they do have I guess is the previous border is at least something to build upon but you'd have to completely reform the nation from the ground up because they had they start with nothing when they're their independence is gained so if we know the borders don't work for Africa we have to ask can the borders of Africa be fixed sure good question [Music] mr. actual intro cool cool okay so first I'd like to take a look at this map published by Harvard University in 1959 look at that I mean first off you could never make nations based off of this there is nowhere close to being enough meet your resources do that but it shows the tribal difference I guess the idea would be I don't know could you you form them you get a bunch of tribes and make them but make sure the whole tribe is enveloped in a nation is that like the best thing you do because you could not make this many independent nations there's no way you would have any functionality what's shown is the approximate territorial boundaries of various tribes and nations found within the continent looking at this we can see the boundaries are by no means uniform where it's hard to live like the Sahara the territories are an orange and sparsely populated with some even being labeled as uninhabited where the natural conditions become more favorable like West Africa and the Lakes region we can see an explosion in ethno diversity and the map becomes crowded using these borders but now plotting conflicts across the continent we can see a problem let's take a look at this real quick say the so conflicts alright so we got them in the more densely populated areas resource rich places look at like Liberia which is interesting because they actually had independence Liberia stories interesting cuz they did not get colonized they were a protector of the United States a lot of that in big part too after slavery is ended in the United States on there was a group of African Americans freed African Americans they end up moving to to Africa a lot of them went to Liberia Ethiopia is the other one Ethiopia is the fascinating story because that was only one that was able to militarily defend themselves King men alike and the Ethiopians defend themselves against the Italians and were able the only ones militarily able to defend themselves and keep their independence at least in this in this era eventually Italians come back and in between World Wars 1 & 2 and do take it ethnic diversity in Africa appears to be linked to conflict this map reminds me a lot of maps of the Holy Roman Empire with all of its many small and intricate tribes or in this case kingdoms fighting each other until well there was nothing really left to fight about that was the big criticism the Holy Roman Empire right it wasn't really an empires a bunch of it's basically autonomous states and it was all Holy Roman Empire name only right that's why giving each and every tribe and nation in Africa their own country likely wouldn't work and that's what makes drawing borders in Africa so difficult I agree but just like how the many smaller kingdoms of the Holy Roman Empire eventually unified to form Germany these tribal boundaries can be used as the building blocks for larger more stable Christians sure what these true nations of Africa look like however depends on your definition of a nation for Germany forming a nation meant unification through a common religion language and ancestral descent so that is something you're up to take into account because Africa is religiously diverse as you have Christian groups and then you have Islamic groups predominantly but there are other ones so but then it also gets you know tricky too because if you do it just on religion that could those borders may not make sense on that that front - so like do you blend you have to find some kind of like common ground between maybe like religious forming boundaries based on religious things but then also in tribal it's hard like I don't know how you you know you do this where the people practiced Catholicism or spoke French or were Italians that well those became different countries so by using these three factors religion language and ancestry we can start working on a framework for what the true unified nations of Africa would look like okay stays the clearest a dividing line within Africa's population is religion which is why I made it first well laughter but that's that's interesting to look on the UH what I call enclaves Conclave what's it called the term when you have a like in like Lesotho and Swaziland and stuff like these places where you're you have a group that's like just set in the middle of another nation I forgot that the term for that but Africa has a lot of that you can see them dotted in there which makes infrastructure difficult Africa is the land of rich with its own name beliefs to major religions Christianity and Islam have come to play overarching roles across nearly the entire continent dividing Africa into a majority Islam north indi majority Christian South this Islamic influence in the north is the result of expansions by several different caliphates and empires over the centuries connecting North Africa religiously and therefore culturally with their neighbors in the Middle East and Mediterranean yeah I mean generally speaking Islam has been in Africa far longer than Christianity yeah there's like Aksum and some of the little tiny Christian group that comes out very early on in the first millennium but predominantly Islamic as they came in conquered and established trading routes across the Sahara Europe though the same could be said in part for Christi that's access by the way Aksum as in Ethiopia is one of the oldest basically the oldest Christian community in Africa they developed really interesting in Ethiopia they developed totally independent from the Catholic and Orthodox churches basically developing over centuries their own little brand of Christianity really cool but they had one of the cool features there is they got those they built into the cliffs and the in the ground their churches that's a church down there really cool ax ax UN where Islam even existed Christianity as a whole saw its greatest advance through the later missionary work during colonization estimates place Africa's Christian population at around 630 million followers beating out Latin America to become the home to the largest Christian population anywhere on earth that being said until the Llano that Islam was even more prevalent making up forty five percent of Africa's population compared to only forty percent encompassed by Christianity back in the early 2000s since then however the Christian countries of Africa have experienced a far more significant boom and population increasing their total number of followers resulting in the two religions having nearly the exact same number of followers on the continent today leaving a Muslim Africa which covers around 15 million square kilometres and a Christian Africa also covering around 15 million square kilometres well yeah and you could never make a nation base a nation off that religious unity is not on you saw that in the early Islamic caliphates anyways they tried to like like the Umayyad caliphate when the earliest ones they tried to organize basically a nation-state as a one would that was governed with with like an Islamic principles like dear this is gonna be an Islamic unified state and then being Islamic will be enough to unify that never worked there's too many differences right there's too many cultural differences between something that vast doesn't work religion is not enough to just create a nation out of it's actually pretty remarkable just how evenly religion divides the continent but of course it's more complicated than this now first to shout out to Islam for only having one major sect a Sunni Islam found throughout and shout out to Christianity for Shia Islam is is very it's it's a lot smaller it's only about 15 percent of Islam and is most solely in the Middle East having for though only three you really come into play here catholicism protestantism i I have a little issue with the term Protestantism because others saying with Protestantism is not Catholic and we all know Protestantism is it's a very loose term about basically anything that's not Catholic or Orthodox or Greek Orthodox so it's hard to say they're all it's not just they're just Protestantism because Protestants have all kinds of differences at different beliefs it's why there's so many Protestant churches you know but yeah I mean Protestantism is the thing but it's not a religion and Ethiopian Orthodox the fourth one is Coptic Orthodox is centered within Egypt but they don't have a majority there so we're really not going to talk about them looking at this we can see it's not only tribal affiliations that divide African nations but religious ones too seem clearly by looking at places like Nigeria or Savio Pio where this religion is roughly God look at a Theo Pia's diversity you got that like we're saying the early early early Christian early couple sent first two three centuries of Christianity they would already had a community down there so you got that the African Christianity and then there man look at that you got Protestants you got a little looks like a little little thing of Catholicism in there that would be the hardest country probably unifier right there based off the religious differences or to create one out of that and then there's places like Mozambique where not only do cheese catholicism and protestantism occupy equal areas but coexist with substantial traditional beliefs here as well well there are only two major religions on the continent Africa is home to over 2,000 different languages what this means is that we can't look at each individual language but instead we'll have to look at language families that you can do because there are a lot of origin families but language may be the most important thing there is for cultural unity even more than religion and and Africa has yeah what they say may be the thousand languages like that is so difficult to be able to deal with so like how the Romance language family contains within it several related but distinct languages the same can be said about all those found in Africa considered and chose to diverse in the world is the Niger Congo language family alone containing around 1500 languages and covering nearly all of sub-saharan Africa with 700 million native speakers this is the third most spoken language family in the world and because of it I'd like to split it up a little more but I mean you saw like just cuz your language family does not mean you can communicate with each other South the romance Spanish Italian like what yet what do you get when you get back on in French they still can't communicate with each other like you that's not enough that's such a broad to do this we can look at the languages only considered part of the Bantu subfamily splitting the language friendly into its Niger and Congo or Bantu halves I chose this because of the 700 million Niger Congo speakers around 350 million can be defined as Bantu cutting this language family perfectly in half the next-biggest family on the continent is what's called the afro-asiatic language family like Islam these are the languages that came through Africa through the involvement with their outside neighbors which means the main language found throughout here is Arab Arabic with only two big exceptions a lot of it did blend though that air a lot of Arabic blended with local ones and created a blended language deep in the heart of the Sahara there's the Tuareg language used by the nearly three million nomadic MSE who roamed throughout this area today and then down around the Horn of Africa are the Koushik languages shared across Ethiopia and Somalia between these is the third and final major language family in Africa nilo-saharan similar to the Niger Congo family nilo-saharan can be easily broken into two major groups the Nilo part comes from the people living around the Nile River with a couple small enclaves following the river all the way up to Egypt while the other half branches out deep into the Sahara more or less centered around Lake Chad after the three major who are used to be there's not much of a lake Chad left anymore used to be way bigger language family - we equally distinct but smaller families both of which can be found at the bottom of the continent first there's the Khoisan language family which is where you'll find the famous clicking consonants being used so fascinating that's such a fascinating language oh he's talking but then you have those clicks unlike anything else huh that's it's so interesting tides that there isn't much connecting many of the individual languages within this family together and the term koi Sun kind of works as a catch-all for a multitude of otherwise on categorizable and unrelated groups in the area below them is where we'll find the Afrikaans language now while many European languages are spoken across Africa this is the only one that evolved into its own distinct language deriving originally from Dutch spoken now by a majority of both people of African and of Dutch heritage here what this shows is that as people move and spread they bring their language with them learning race and language often go hand in hand with one another and looking at a racial breakdown of the continent we can see every linguistic family corresponds to a specific racial group as well they're really not they're really not bringing in though like the European language is there I mean English and French like are spoken widely in Africa right because it was imposed you know for so long they're not really taken ahead to account to though which is why I'm not gonna go much further into race other than to point out to significant groups not touched on by language the first are the Chaddock people who occupy North Nigeria and southern Niger essentially the house that I was talking about earlier and second are the band of people both of which together served to chop up the Niger Congo language family even more in summary religion divides the continent into a clear North and South Muslim and Christian Africa language creates anywhere between six to nine domains and finally with race we have a combination of the two using all three we can begin to see what I'd like to call the big lines of Africa take form which again defined the theoretical limit of nations in Africa what this means is that a country contained entirely within these lines likely has a better chance of establishing peace and stability than a country that crosses them so should these be the borders of Africa well that's up for debate to see why we can look at a place like Sudan you see in 2010 the country of Sudan looked like this even though religiously linguistically and racially it was clearly divided which is why the lines I created cut the modern country in two and that's also why in 2011 South Sudan successfully separated itself from the north to become the youngest country in the world and that was very much on Christian and Islamic boundaries there but then you see I don't maybe I don't they'll get to it but then then South Sudan gets all these major problems - as a new nation it wasn't enough just to split based off of those principles which means the South Sudan can be seen as a test run for this concept of breaking apart Africa along these lines the only problem is with an ongoing civil war that began just two years after the country's formation and already several humanitarian crises underway the early years of this new nation haven't been exactly easy I mean just look at how long the Wikipedia page for ethnic violence in South Sudan is and I think this reveals something even more important about Africa despite a shared religion a shared language and a shared race smaller ethnic groups within these still do not get along and this is because borders aren't the only problem sure keeping with South Sudan so yeah what is it going to be now what are they going to get to it now and since its formation the country has experienced a water crisis a refugee crisis from a neighboring war and a famine which is a lot for any country to deal with all at once so it doesn't dry your beginnings a surprise when the newer arm because you can't imagine a government the government and managing resources remember these places don't have any infrastructure they didn't they didn't have any they did before they could deal with infrastructure issues they deal with just border issues right it's just lining adding up the the you know checklist of things they need to do as a nation again while doing that while your people are starving hard to get hard to get moving if you can't even get the survival aspect taken care of first Marie of South Sudan suggested to wipe out the entire merle tribe on the face of the earth as the only solution to guarantee long-term security of newer cattle what this reveals is that although conflicts are often fought along tribal lines the causes of these conflicts often have more to do with resources and than they do with the tribes themselves what this has done is create a cycle in which scarcity it leads to conflict which creates a more scarcity leading to even more conflict okay so it looks like where they're going here with this is conflicts based off of resources which I guess a lot of people you don't don't talk about I mean the most important commodity there is I mean it's a viable right you've got to have that I mean if you can't have that you can't do anything so yeah resources war for resources so based off of that more than any ethnic group any ethnic or religious divisions is there's so many of us and there's so few resources there for conflict no matter what the borders of Africa are this this this this or this as long as people worry about their access to food and water and other basic essentials regional conflicts within even the most balanced of African nations will occur so while this serves as a tenuous framework for the creation of new states within the continent that isn't the full picture there's no way you see this like if this this there's no way this could be a nation there's so much diversity right there I mean maybe you can make it's just like I don't I don't know I don't know how you do I don't know how you make it work I don't I think to end this I'd just like to say that while Africa's borders haven't been friendly to many of the countries they define that's not to say there haven't been some success story to come out of them per se and to break up these countries would likely be detrimental to the progress made since colonisation when European colonialism collapsed in Africa after the Second World War in control of Africa was handed over to Africans the newfound leaders faced a decision to keep the borders handed down to them and suffer through the conflicts between mismatched tribes or to rearrange them and suffer through the new conflicts that arise damned if they do damned if they don't in a move that echoed to the Berlin conference African leaders made the collective decision to keep the arbitrary borders as they had been drawn by Europeans to preserve one little piece there was left in Africa after World War two that is maybe when you think about but maybe the bit that's by the biggest decision that was that's been made that has impacted things today was the fact that African nations decided to basically keep those borders and just try to deal with it I guess if a change should have happened border wise it probably should have been back then right then when when they get independence of all right let's reform everything but trying to stick to it maybe I don't know if they didn't realize there'd be as divisive as it was or it was simply just like you know the most sensible decision that way and it was the one with the least amount of problems even though there's going to be probably what they're going for there and so far this strategy has been working and peace in Africa has been steadily increasing since the 70s looking at the Global Peace Index for 2019 we can see many African nations have climbed to rank among the most peaceful in the world with the 36s or exactly 2/3 of them ranking more peaceful than the United States and as Africa's recent population boom slows down an economic investment steadily increases the continent that's the biggest thing that has to happen is economic security security and you're seeing right right now a big farm for more investments they were they definitely require foreign investments they need the capital from other other nations to come in and invest here without exploiting Africa that's what has to happen because otherwise you're just gonna get more of what happened in the colonial era which is the exploitation and not building up of in structure for it to work it has to benefit both the investor and a place that you're investing in otherwise it'll just be more of the same forever but if you get that economic stability and let them build wealth and security for themselves finding that balance with your investors then I mean that's that's the only way I could see I mean it's only way that Africa is gonna grow at a fast rate it still has its brightest years ahead of it hey I hope you enjoyed I put a lot of research into this one and spent a few weeks just writing the script so if you did enjoy and you'd like to support what I do here you can check out my patreon other than that I'm wrapping up with school right now so hopefully you guys will start to see more frequent uploads against so subscribe if you haven't to see those thanks awesome this is fantastic I love this I love it when geography and history meet those are like my two academic passions or when those meet and there they they usually do but when you can specifically put it together it's just I don't know it inspires me to learn about and be interested in it so awesome yeah they did exactly what I was hoping this video would be about which is yeah the territorial problems that relate to history and trying to you know talk about the future in that way and and what what hopefully is the best course of action for the the strengths of Africa because I mean a strengths strong you know a strong stable Africa helps the entire planet with that fewer conflicts in general in the world is better for you know it's better for everybody but there's yeah I don't there's obviously not a perfect system for the borders of Africa it's just I mean it's the cradle of civilization down there and and and it's where humanity originates and there's so much history there that you know the longer the history is the more diverse a place is going to be and that's that's just the issue I guess with that there's just so much diversity there and so much has changed historically that yeah I don't know there's a perfect system that you will ever have in Africa I mean you can say that even a modern nations right and now that we live in a very globalized world where so many people are in different parts of the world of having to try to figure out how do you create successful nation-states or to even question the role of nation-states should we should we be looking at what the definition of nation-states are and how they should look in a modern sense a modern globalized sense we need to change our definitions and things like that but all that's hard to do and hard to get consensus on so maybe what he's saying is you know the best that really African do is try to find a balance between the tribal linguistic and religious sort of divisions and that's the best you can do right it's never gonna be perfect but it's the best you could probably do they're so awesome all right this channel was great let me know if you liked this channel and would like to see more videos from them and we will check out their playlist and see if we can learn more and hopefully I can add some stuff to help out the video and help you guys out and as we hopefully our continued build our little community with me and all of you watching that we can go through and educate ourselves even better all right if you like this video I know I did I'll be subbing to them go down to the description and give them the a like and sub love to have you as a sub as well hit that notification button as well so you know what my live streams are other ways to support the channel to like this channel I also have a patreon account and that helps keep this channel running one of the big perks of become a patreon member is to vote in polls for videos that get here starting at just a dollar a month that's a way that you can really help the channel that way as well alright also if you'd like to be part of our community we have a great discord community you can join that and get involved with a lot of discussions of all kinds of historical themes so invite you to do that links to all that stuff is gonna be down below in the description all right we'll go ahead and call it here we'll see you next time bye [Music] you

Channel: Mr. Terry History

Views: 205,406

Keywords: react, history, africa, imperialism, borders

Id: LpbskhnqxVw

Length: 32min 58sec (1978 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 18 2020